Welcome to Venice

Impressions

Venice is too simple a name for a place formed by over 100 tiny islands. Each island grew out of the literal muck as a segregated human community, with its own cathedral and bell tower, and houses built wherever they could stand. Doges may have ruled the people long ago, but water has always been the true reigning monarch of the city. Eventually, bridges sprang up over the waterways to connect neighboring islands, until there were over 400 of them. But this has not, in my professional opinion, made the city any easier to navigate.

An alley that looks perfectly helpful might run only a hundred meters before it doglegs and ends at a bridgeless canal, or in a blind courtyard, or spawns three more alleys. This alleyway maze has an hypnotic effect, and the canals are no better; if anything, they’re just the water half of the Venetian puzzle. As an experiment one day while I was wandering through the Jewish Ghetto, I put away Google Maps. Within a single minute I had had to turn around four times, laughing in disbelief every time I came up against another locked door or a canal. Eventually I stopped getting annoyed when my toes kissed the edge of another uncrossable canal, and instead I would pause and stare dreamily into its milky depths. Endless parades of boats flowed by: gondolas, of course, but also work boats, delivery boats, garbage boats, and once an ambulance boat that came roaring in from the Grand Canal, banking in a spectacular Hollywood-movie kind of way with its lights and siren blaring.

The wider Venetian lagoon hugs an endless string of low islands, most of which are uninhabited. One day I hopped aboard a vaporetto (water bus), which is the singular form of public transport. I was headed for the ‘burbs. Once again I woke with the sun, this time headed north through a dense bank of fog. I fell into step with a long parade of locals, many of whom greeted each other by name. The vaporetto’s hull was filled with a troupe of young soccer players and a handful of businesspeople and me. Within seconds of leaving the dock we were swallowed by mist, our captain guided through the channel solely by memory and a long line of wooden pylons that I tried my best to ignore (I’m deathly afraid of human things underwater, don’t ask).

My first stop was Murano, famous for its artisian glass. I wandered the haunted-looking streets, pausing here and there to watch local fishermen and families carrying flowers into the graveyard. The mist and the glassy magic wore off before noon, and I escaped the growing crowds by hopping the next ferry further north to Burano.

If Venetian mazes had lulled me into calm, Burano’s streets put me in a straight-up trance. For reasons kind of lost to history, Burano’s houses have all been painted in aggressively bright hues. Magenta and lavender and lime and azul were smashed up against each other in dizzying succession. The saturation was doubled by the golden rays of the fall afternoon sun, then quadrupled by reflections in the canals. Entire piazzas of primary colors stood empty, save for brilliant light and a line or two of drying clothes blowing gently in the breeze. I paused by the edge of the open lagoon to give my dazzled eyes a break, and there I witnessed an entirely different but equally curious sight: a pair of teenage boys were drag-racing their family boats just offshore, blaring AC/DC from Bluetooth speakers.

Kids these days.

Pages: 1 2 3 4